The reason why the shelter does this is because the shelter wants to return as many stray dogs as possible. At our local shelter, they have to kill an average of 500 dogs and cats every month because of overcrowding. Any dog or cat that they can return to its owner is one less animal they have to kill. Tags on collars can get lost or mangled. The microchip can’t get lost and will last for decades. And it is so small about the size of a grain of rice that the dog doesn’t even know it is there.

The technology behind these chips is fascinating. They are called Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, chips. Sealed inside a tiny glass cylinder is an even tinier radio transmitter along with an incredibly small computer. The computer contains the unique ID number. It sends the number to the radio transmitter, which broadcasts it to the scanner. Obviously this tiny radio is not very powerful, so the scanner has to be just an inch or two away for it to pick up the transmission. But it is a transmission nonetheless. So the scanner picks up the radio’s signal, decodes the number and displays it.

But where do the computer and radio transmitter get their power? There is no battery embedded in the dog’s neck. This is the ingenious part of an RFID chip. The scanner actually sends out a fluctuating magnetic field into the dog. The RFID chip contains another antenna that picks up this magnetic energy and converts it into electricity. This electricity then powers the computer and radio transmitter. So the dog’s chip is sitting there, doing nothing, until a scanner comes along. The scanner provides the chip with the wireless power it needs to send out its unique ID number. Then the chip goes dormant once again.

Source and More : www.southernillinoisan.com

How come RFID hasn’t taken off in Pakistan?

Better late then never but not really true. May not at a mass level but there are quite a few RFID projects on experimental basis that had been initiated in Pakistan by technology enthusiasts. On government scale, we can name ePassport at NADRA and eTAG by National Highway Authority as pretty good initiatives. These fascinating projects are suffering due to the negligence and lack of vision of the project owners who are either too busy or already cashed its commercial aspect in terms of deployment. Proper infrastructure to back up has not been provided and neither the projects been advertised to educate people what benefits they can gain by using the RFID. ePassports are currently being issued using a 2D Barcode and only a few ePassports carry RFID chips being used for experimental basis.

RFID Tag

On private scale the RFID is mainly used in the time and attendance management purposes in Pakistan. This is one area where RFID implementation can be seen spreading at a high speed. Although advances in radio frequency identification technology have enabled the early adoption in other commercial applications like supply chain management, logistics and transportation as well but I believe that although RFID has an advantage over plain vanilla bar-coding in logistics, it will take a while for it to become mainstream.

We know what makes RFID so useful. What makes RFID so expensive?

Expensive is a word that’s frequently associated with RFID, most commonly regarding the tags, but ‘unwieldy’ – well, there is no doubt some that might agree, but any major technology investment implies change, which can indeed be painful. Could a move towards RFID be complex? Yes. Would it imply process change? Yes. Is it necessarily ‘unwieldy’? Not so sure. Unwieldy tends to imply little long term benefit, and just a headache to implement. I think RFID ultimately offers significantly more than that.